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Vocabulary
Two layers, two vocabularies, one mapping.
The protocol returns a judgement about a proposed action. The signed dossier states what then happened. Each layer has its own words, and this page defines both — and how they line up.
Protocol verdicts
What the decision engine returns for a proposed action. These are the words on canonical diagrams 1 and 2, in the API docs, and in the govern GitHub Action.
ALLOWAuthorized
The action is within policy on the evidence presented. It executes, and the dossier records the authority it executed under.
ESCALATENeeds approval or more info
The action needs authority the requester does not hold, or evidence the request did not carry. It waits, routed to whoever can supply it.
BLOCKHigh risk or out of policy
The action breaches policy or crosses a risk threshold. It does not execute, and the dossier records which rule stopped it and on what evidence.
Dossier verdicts
What the signed record states about the outcome. These tokens live inside the Ed25519-signed payload, so they are never renamed — a rename would invalidate the signature on every dossier already issued.
AUTHORIZEDExecuted under recorded authority
The action was within policy on the evidence presented, and it ran. The dossier records the authority it executed under.
Corresponding protocol verdict
ALLOW
ESCALATERestrained and routed for human approval
The action was held short of execution and referred to someone who holds the authority to permit it. The dossier records which rule escalated it, and to whom. It is not a refusal — the action can still proceed once approved.
Corresponding protocol verdict
ESCALATE
BLOCKEDRefused outright
The action breached policy or crossed a risk threshold and did not execute. Nobody is asked to approve it. The dossier records the rule that refused it and the evidence behind that refusal.
Corresponding protocol verdict
BLOCK
PENDING_MFAAwaiting a step-up challenge
The action is paused pending stronger authentication from the requester rather than approval from someone else. It has neither executed nor been refused — the dossier is open, and resolves once the challenge is answered.
Corresponding protocol verdict
ESCALATE
No exact protocol equivalent: PENDING_MFA is an open state awaiting a challenge, not a decision the engine returned. ESCALATE is the closest judgement.
Why there are two vocabularies
A protocol verdict is a judgement about a request; a dossier verdict is a statement about what happened to it. Collapsing them would lose that distinction — and would lose PENDING_MFA entirely, since the protocol has no word for an action paused mid-flight. The verdict is also written into the dossier before it is signed, so the token is part of the signed payload: renaming it would break verification on every record already issued, and independent verification is the point of the artifact.
What this means in practice: read the token in the vocabulary of the layer you are in, and use the mapping above to reconcile the two. Anything asking “did this execute?” can rely on the correspondence rather than on string matching.
Verdicts are not enforcement actions
The verdict is the judgement. The action is what the surface does about it — which is why one verdict can drive different enforcement at a checkout, an ERP posting, or an agent's tool call.
- Allow
- Block
- Require Approval
- Throttle / Limit
The protocol returns three verdicts; the dossier records four outcomes. The extra one is PENDING_MFA, an action paused mid-flight awaiting a step-up challenge — a state that has not yet resolved into either execution or refusal, and therefore has no protocol verdict of its own.
Surfaces are not connectors
These two words do different jobs, and blurring them makes the catalogue look twice as large as it is.
Surface
Surfaces are where people encounter Decionis — Shield, the sandbox, the governance console, MCP, the GitHub Action.
See all surfacesConnector
Connectors are how systems reach the protocol — webhooks, Zapier, Make, n8n, Shopify, SAP, Salesforce.
See all connectors